(M201) The conjecture that the practice of cutting out the tongues of dead animals may sometimes be a precaution to prevent their ghosts from telling tales, is to some extent confirmed by a ceremony which the Bechuanas used to observe after a battle. It was customary with them on these occasions to sacrifice a fine black ox, called the expiatory victim (_pekou_), cut off the tip of its tongue, and extract one of its eyes together with a piece of the hamstring and a piece of the principal tendon of the shoulder; and the severed parts were afterwards carefully fried, along with some medicinal herbs, in a horn by a medicine-man. The reasons for thus mutilating the animal were explained by a native to two French missionaries. “If we cut out and purify the victim’s tongue,” said he, “the motive is to induce the guardian deities to prevent the enemy from speaking ill of us. We ask also that the sinews of their feet and hands may fail them in the battle; and that their eyes may not cast a covetous look on our herds.”(792) In this custom the sacrificial ox appears to be treated as the ceremonial equivalent of the enemy; accordingly by cutting out its tongue you obviously prevent your enemy from cursing you, for how can he curse you if he has no tongue? Similarly, by hamstringing the beast you ensure that the legs and arms of your adversary will fail him in the battle, and by gouging out the ox’s eye you make perfectly certain that the foe will never be able to cast a longing eye on your fat beeves. Thus for all practical purposes the mutilation of the ox is quite as effective as the mutilation of the enemy’s dead, which is sometimes practised by savages from similar superstitious motives. Thus on the return from a field of battle the Baganda used to cut up one or two of the enemy’s dead, scoop out the eyes, cut off the ears, and lay the limbs on the road taken by the returning army “to prevent evil following them.”(793) The nature of the evil which the Baganda warriors feared to incur if they did not mutilate the dead in this fashion, is not mentioned, but we may conjecture that by gouging out the eyes and ears of their slain foes they hoped to make their angry ghosts blind and deaf; or perhaps, upon the principles of homoeopathic magic, they counted on maiming their living foes in like manner. Some of the aborigines of Australia cut off the thumbs of their dead enemies in order that their ghosts may not be able to throw spears.(794) Other Australian tribes burn off the thumb nails of their own dead to prevent the poor ghost from scratching a way for himself out of the grave.(795) When the Tupi Indians of Brazil killed and ate a prisoner, “the thumb was cut off because of its use in archery, an art concerning which they were singularly superstitious; what was done with it does not appear, except that it was not eaten like the rest.”(796) Perhaps these Indians, like the Australians, thought by this mutilation to disarm the